My post here came out harsher than what I should have written. I can't find a nicer rephrase, the content's exactly what I wanted to say, but less aggressive sounding. Can you adjust that in the reading?
I think it's interesting that you're only getting responses from people who either have *some* hearing or did at some point in the past. You're trying to find out what happens inside the experience of someone who has always been purely deaf, for good reason: you're wondering about what happens when there's no experience of external sound, and no memory of external sound.
It may be that for the people you'd really like to talk to, the question doesn't make sense. I don't know for sure, because I'm not deaf, so the experience isn't mine. But if it's not a question of sound vs silence, what-do-you-hear-when-you-can't-hear kind of thing, but instead this sense simply is not there, that's really different. It's like saying a blind person is seeing darkness vs just that they don't see.
Again I don't know. I suspect it's more like the second, but nobody lives in another person's experience. And I think that's part of the problem in trying to get an answer to your question. Because if you look at pure deafness from birth as never having experienced sound (not counting feeling vibrations, that sort of thing) then how is a person, coming from that place, going to describe their experience to you or me, in the context of our hearing experience? They don't know what it's like in our heads anymore than we can know what it's like in theirs. So it's almost like maybe there can be no language to effectively describe the one experience from the point of reference of the other. Again I'm not sure, but I think there are some things that are just lived, and if you try to *describe* them, the description never really does the job. Other people with the experience say "oh yeah, that's a good description of it" and people who haven't still don't get it. Sometimes they know they don't get it, other times they think they do, but the gap in understanding is still there.
I had a question once that I wanted to ask that involved the Deaf experience, and came up against the same wall. The people I asked were really nice about it, but we ended up in this awful tangle, and the more we tried to clarify, the tighter the knots became. I stood there trying to say "no, that's not really my question, I'll try to ask a different way..." and all the hearing people who saw me ask were like "yeah, that's a good question, I understand what you're asking" and the Deaf people were all looking at me like I was spouting gibberish. It may be that my question couldn't make sense to them, or maybe, from my own cultural (etc) standpoint, I wasn't able to comprehend why the answers they were giving me did make sense.
It's weird, you have some little curiosity, and go to check it out, and hit a hitch, and try to dig into it a little, and find out that you're actually looking at this massive canyon between you and what you're trying to understand. That was how I felt anyway. I think that becoming aware of that is extremely valuable though. Knowing that we don't know gives us a much better opportunity to, well, to not be jerks.
but it's definitely enlightening.
